Digitale Keynote: Borderlands / Border Crossers / Border Transit – On the Aesthetic Topography of Music History in Plural Societies
Monday, March 18, 2024, 5:30 p.m
Keynote by Professor Dr. h.c. Philip Bohlman (University of Chicago) at the international conference “Music and History in Plural Societies – French-German Perspectives”
How does the nation come into being? Where are the origins of its diversity? Of its musics and their history? In contrast to most approaches to music historiography, which locate music of a nation at its center, where it is manifest in dominant and canonical repertories as well as centralizing processes, I turn in this paper toward the conditions of diversity, difference, and human precarity that form across borderlands. My goal is not to place borders around discrete music cultures, but rather to gather the fragments that result from border crossing. These are the fragments that together cohere as the aesthetic topography of the borderland, the many paths border crossers must follow, and in doing so they also chart a music history of difference. My point of departure in the paper serves also as my point of entry: I seek to understand the diversity of music and history from the inside-out. The aesthetic topography of the borderland that I propose contains five processes, sketched in the following table:
- Exclusivity / inclusivity
- Transformation / transit
- Connection / encounter
- Border / borderland
- Liminal spaces of ritual / spaces of the everyday
An aesthetic topography of music and history in plural societies encompasses global dimensions, which I examine in this paper largely with case studies from the borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe.
Philip V. Bohlman is Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor at the Music Department of the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. He received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was honoured as Dr. h.c. by the Romanian National University of Music Bucharest. His recent book publications include Wie sängen wir Seinen Gesang auf dem Boden der Fremde! (LIT Verlag, 2019), World Music: A Very Short Introduction (20202) and Wolokolamsker Chaussee (Bloomsbury 33 1/3, 2021). He is musical director of the cabaret New Budapest Orpheum Society which performs worldwide. 2022 was awarded the International Balzan Prize in Ethnomusicology.
